Last week I was nominated for the “Ennovator 2013” (Enova + innovator) award. While I was not a winner, I was really happy for both the fact that I was nominated and that I made it to the short list of three finalists.

I realize that my work is mostly “invisible”, even business people who work very closely with our team, often care only about new features, not about why it works, and why in works fast. And I would say, this is perfectly normal, because that means that we deliver what we promise, and that our customers expect us to deliver a high-quality applications. And in comparison with other application developers the work of database developer is even less visible – I do not produce cool interfaces, “flashing cards” and other “visible” things. I do not created new simpler scenarions for the application user… I am an actual back end!

That’s why I was so happy to find out, that I was nominated – it meant, that people actually see, what I am doing :).

But there is something else about innovations, which is way more important. When my manager learned, that I nominated him, he said – why? I didn’t do anything. And I told him, that I won’t be able to accomplish anything without his innovative management. The consistency, with which he utilizes Agile technology earned our team a trust from business – business knows, that we deliver what we promise, and thereby trust our judgement.

So, the other side of the innovation on the back and is, that I won’t be able to accomplish anything without support of my teammates and other coworkers, and this support has being tremendous! I can easily name a couple of dozen of people, who helped me way beyond there immediate job responsibilities. Not only application and UI developers, but also our wonderful QA, and DBA team, and managers of other squads, and other application and database developers, who absolutely did not have to help me – but they did. Not only they helped me by reviewing my code, testing my functions, gathering execution statistics, but they also helped me, when they showed me their support. When I knew, they understand, what I am trying to accomplish, when they were telling me: do it!